Stuff about random Stuff

And just like autumn comes now and again, so does the time when my country, Spain, tears itself apart for one lack of reason or another. You might read all sort of news about it but they will mostly be processed products of a well oiled propaganda machine serving their masters at both sides of the aisle; true it is that the first casualty of war is truth.

In a conflict situation words like truth, freedom, justice, democracy and, in general, any word with a heavy positive charge loses its meaning since they are appropriated by every side in the conflict. Still, regardless where the truth lies —pun intended— I am more interested in this post about the dynamics of conflicts, why they happen and if they can be prevented or even solved.

For this goal I will not use historical arguments that The Dude might reject with his demolishing counter argumentation, but instead I will lay out a few common sense dynamics for a social simulation to finally discuss its results… Also, at the end I will surrender my opinion for any dude to refute at will.

Fear not, I am not going to perform any analysis proving the superiority of any race or gender. Also, as a 100% Spaniard (I need to check on that though) I do not belong to the “elite” of ethnics groups disputing supremacy, namely: Northern Europeans, Jews and Far-East Asians and, quite frankly, I feel kinda good about it since I’d rather stick to the Latin Lover stereotype which, by all means, it is true.

I would have disregarded the video as your standard white supremacy internet rhetoric except for I know Steven Pinker from his published works and achievements, and he is no small fish in the Psychology and Cognitive Science world. That is why I decided to give a shot to his video to see what’s what until he began talking about statistics. These are his words:

“…Jewish achievements might have an explanation on another fact that has long been known; that Jewish score on average higher on IQ tests than any ethnic group for what there’s comparable data. Their mean IQ is between 108 and 115, the mean of the European population is by definition a hundred which means that the Jewish average is a whole standard deviation higher than the [European] average… Importantly, even if the effect is moderate on average it’s a mathematical fact in Normal Distributions, that is Bell’s Curves, that small effects in the average can translate into huge effects at the extreme… So with one standard deviation difference between groups a score that is three standard deviation above the mean in the higher distribution is four standard deviations in the lower distribution which means there are 42 times as many people at that cut off.” – Steven Pinker

In short, according to Steven Pinker there are 42 times more chances for a Jewish baby to be born an IQ genius than for an European one… But, is that really so?

As promised in the Don Quijote de la Network post, I Just packaged the R code that generated the data used in Gephi to visualize the network graphs describing Don Quijote.

Now it should be fairly simple (or at least simpler) for anybody to generate such graphs for their favorite books. And since the package automatizes the process like if a robot was collecting the coappearances of elements within a text, its name came to be… Robocoap.

For now the package has just one function (novel.coap) intended for books with a novel format. With minor work, and down the road, the package will also handle theater plays & movie scripts formats and, with a little bit more of work, collections of research papers. Until then, enjoy your novels and have fun!

So your perfect ideal mathematical model returns values that are impossible; probabilities bigger than one or smaller than zero, negative stock market values, et cetera, and now you feel like quoting George Box… again.

Sometimes the mathematical model embeds a solution to keep things real like, for example, logistic regressions. However, very often many popular models like ARIMA offer no possibility to bound its results within business or scientific constrains, and then what? These are a few common options:

As an interesting anecdote about the qualities of this novel, Sigmund Freud first came to Don Quijote as a boy and loved the novel so much that he learnt Spanish so as to read it in its original language keeping the secret from his parents who might have disapproved of the hobby. So if you want to fully enjoy the book and not to lose anything in translation go Freud on it.

So let’s follow Don Quijote through the Network and, in case it is not obvious enough, doing this sort of analysis on a book implies major spoilers ahead.